Robocars

Americans, in particular, will never give up car ownership! You can pry the bent steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.

I can't see why anybody would own a car if there were fast robotaxi service!

Surely human drivers will be banned from the roads before too long.

I predict neither extreme will be true. I predict the market will offer all options to the public, and several options will be very popular. I am not even sure which will be the most popular.

Many people will stick to buying and driving classic, manually driven cars. The newer versions of these cars will have fancy ADAS systems that make them much harder to crash, and their accident levels will be lower.

Many will buy a robocar for their near-exclusive use. It will park near where it drops them off and always be ready. It will keep their stuff in the trunk.

People who live and work in an area with robotaxi service will give up car ownership, and hire for all their needs, using a wide variety of vehicles.

Some people will purchase a robocar mostly for their use, but will hire it out when they know they are not likely to use it, allowing them to own a better car. They will make rarer use of robotaxi services to cover specialty trips or those times when they hired it out and ended up needing it. Their stuff will stay in a special locker in the car.

In addition, people will mix these models. Families that own 2 or more cars will switch to owning fewer cars and hiring for extra use and special uses. For example, if you own a 2 person car, you would summon a larger taxi when 3 or more are together. In particular, parents may find that they don't want to buy a car for their teen-ager, but would rather just subsidize their robotaxi travel. Parents will want to do this and get logs of where their children travel, and of course teens will resist that, causing a conflict.

There's been a lot of press recently about an article in Slate by
Lee Gomes which paints a pessimistic picture of the future of
robocars, and particularly Google's project. The Slate article
is a follow-on to a similar article in MIT Tech Review

Gomes and others seem to feel that they and the public were led to believe that
current projects were almost finished and ready to be delivered any day, and
they are disappointed to learn that these vehicles are still research projects
and prototypes. In a classic expression of the Gartner Hype Cycle there are
now predictions that the technology is very far away.

Both predictions are probably wrong. Fully functional robocars that can drive almost
everywhere are not coming this decade, but nor are they many decades away.
But more to the point, less-functional robocars are probably coming this decade -- much sooner than
these articles expect, and these vehicles are much more useful and commercially
viable than people may expect.

There are many challenges facing developers, and those challenges will
keep them busy refining products for a long time to come. Most of those
challenges either already have a path to solution, or constrain a future vehicle
only in modest ways that still allow it to be viable. Some of the problems
are in the "unsolved" class. It is harder to predict when those
solutions will come, of course, but at the same time one should remember that
many of the systems in today's research vehicles were in this class just a
few years ago. Tackling hard problems is just what these teams are good at
doing. This doesn't guarantee success, but neither does it require you bet
against it.

And very few of the problems seem to be in the "unsolvable without human-smart AI" class,
at least none that bar highly useful operation.

Gomes' articles have been the major trigger of press, so I will go over those issues
in detail here first. Later, I will produce an article that has even
more challenges than listed, and what people hope to do about them. Still, the critiques are written almost as though they
expected Google and others, rather than make announcements like "Look at the new milestone we are pleased to
have accomplished" to instead say, "Let's tell you all the things we haven't done yet."

Gomes begins by comparing the car to the Apple Newton, but forgets that
9 years after the Newton fizzled we had the success of the Palm Pilot, and
10 years after that Apple came back with the world-changing iPhone. Today, the pace of
change is much faster than in the 80s.

Here are the primary concerns raised:

Maps are too important, and too costly

Google's car, and others, rely on a clever technique that revolutionized
the DARPA challenges. Each road is driven manually a few times, and the
scans are then processed to build a super-detailed "ultramap" of all the
static features of the road. This is a big win because big server
computers get to process the scans in as much time as they need,
and see everything from different angles. Then humans can review and
correct the maps and they can be tested. That's hard to beat, and you
will always drive better if you have such a map than if you don't.

Any car that could drive without a map would effectively be a car that's
able to make an adequate map automatically. As things get closer to that,
making maps will become cheaper and cheaper.

Naturally, if the road differs from the map, due to construction or
other changes, the vehicle has to notice this. That turns out to be
fairly easy. Harder is assuring it can drive safely in this situation.
That's still a much easier problem than being able to drive safely
everywhere without a map, and in the worst case, the problem of the
changed road can be "solved" by just the ability to come to a safe stop.
You don't want to do that super often, but it remains the fail-safe
out. If there is a human in the car, they can guide the vehicle in this.
Even if the vehicle can't figure out where to go to be safe, the human
can. Even a remote human able to look at transmitted pictures can help
the car with that -- not live steering, but strategic guidance.

This problem only happens to the first car to encounter the surprise construction.
If that car is still able to navigate (perhaps with human help,) the map can be quickly rebuilt, and
if the car had to stop, all unmanned cars can learn to avoid the zone.
They are unmanned, and thus probably not in a hurry.

The cost of maps

In the interests of safety, a lot of work is put into today's maps. It's a cost
that somebody like Google or Mercedes can afford if they need to, (after all, Google's already
scanned every road
in many countries multiple times) but it would be high for smaller players.

In late August, I visited Singapore to give an address at a special conference announcing a government sponsored collaboration involving their Ministry of Transport, the Land Transport Authority and A-STAR, the government funded national R&D centre. I got a chance to meet the minister and sit down with officials and talk about their plans, and 6 months earlier I got the chance to visit A-Star and also the car project at the National University of Singapore.

This has always been a tricky question. Seniors are not early adopters, so the normal instinct would be to expect them to fear a new technology as dramatic as this one. Look at the market for simplified cell phones aimed at seniors who can't imagine why they want a smartphone. Not all are like this, but enough are to raise the question.

I've been on the road a lot, talking in places like Singapore, Shenzen and Hong Kong, and visiting Indonesia which is a driving chaos eye-opener. In a bit over 10 hours I will speak at Swiss Re's conference on robocars and insurance in Zurich. While the start will be my standard talk, in the latter section we will have some new discussion of liability and insurance.

In the essay linked below, I introduce the concept of a medium density urban neighbourhood that acts like a higher density space thanks to robocars functioning like the elevators in the high-rises of high density development.

UK to modify laws for full testing, large grants for R&D

The UK announced that robocar testing will be legalized in January, similar to actions by many US states, but the first major country to do so. Of particular interest is the promise that fully autonomous vehicles, like Google's no-steering-wheel vehicle, will have regulations governing their testing. Because the US states that wrote regulations did so before seeing Google's vehicle, their laws still have open questions about how to test faster versions of it.

Combined with this are large research grant programs, on top of the £10M prize project to be awarded to a city for a testing project, and the planned project in Milton Keynes.

Jerusalem's MobilEye going public in largest Israeli IPO

The leader in doing automated driver assist using cameras is Jerusalem's MobilEye. This week they're going public, to a valuation near $5B and raising over $600 million. MobilEye makes custom ASICs full of machine vision processing tools, and uses those to make camera systems to recognize things on the road. They have announced and demonstrated their own basic supervised self-driving car with this. Their camera, which is cheaper than the radar used in most fancy ADAS systems (but also works with radar for better results) is found in many high-end vehicles. They are a supplier to Tesla, and it is suggested that MobilEye will play a serious role in Tesla's own self-driving plans.

As I have written, I don't believe cameras are even close to sufficient for a fully autonomous vehicle which can run unmanned, though they can be a good complement to radar and especially LIDAR. LIDAR prices will soon drop to the low $thousands, and people taking the risk of deploying the first robocars would be unwise to not use LIDAR to improve their safety just to save a few thousand for early adopters.

Chinese search engine Baidu has robocar (and bicycle) project

Baidu is the big boy in Chinese search -- sadly a big beneficiary of Google's wise and moral decision not to be collaborators on massive internet censorship in China -- and now it's emulating Google in a big way by opening its own self-driving car project.

Various stories suggest a vehicle which involves regular handoff between a driver and the car's systems, something Google decided was too risky. Not many other details are known.

Also rumoured is a project with bicycles. Unknown if that's something like the "bikebot" concept I wrote about 6 years ago, where a small robot would clamp to a bike and use its wheels to deliver the bicycle on demand.

Why another search engine company? Well, one reason Google was able to work quickly is that it is the world's #1 mapping company, and mapping plays a large role in the design of robocars. Baidu says it is their expertise in big data and AI that's driving them to do this.

Velodyne has a new LIDAR

The Velodyne 64 plane LIDAR, which is seen spinning on top of Google's cars and most of the other serious research cars, is made in small volumes and costs a great deal of money -- $75,000. David Hall, who runs Velodyne, has regularly said that in volume it would cost well under $1,000, but we're not there yet. He has released a new LIDAR with just 16 planes. The price, while not finalized, will be much higher than $1K but much lower than $75K (or even the $30K for the 32 plane version found on Ford's test vehicle and some others.)

As a disclaimer, I should note I have joined the advisory board of Quanergy, which is making 8 plane LIDARs at a much lower price than these units.

Nissan goes back and forth on dates

Conflicting reports have come from Nissan on their dates for deployment. At first, it seemed they had predicted fairly autonomous cars by 2020. A later announcement by CEO Carlos Ghosn suggested it might be even earlier. But new reports suggest the product will be less far along, and need more human supervision to operate.

FBI gets all scaremongering

Many years ago, I wrote about the danger that autonomous robots could be loaded with explosives and sent to an address to wreak havoc. That is a concern, but what I wrote was that the greater danger could be the fear of that phenomenon. After all, car accidents kill more people every month in the USA than died at the World Trade Center 13 years ago, and far surpass war and terrorism as forms of violent death and injury in most nations for most of modern history. Nonetheless, an internal FBI document, released through a leak, has them pushing this idea along with the more bizarre idea that such cars would let criminals multitask more and not have to drive their own getaway cars.

I have many more comments pending on my observations from the recent AUVSI/TRB Automated Vehicles Symposium, but for today I would like to put forward an observation I made about two broad schools of thought on the path of the technology and the timeline for adoption. I will call these the aggressive and conservative schools. The aggressive school is represented by Google, Induct (and its successors) and many academic teams, the conservative school involves car companies, most urban planners and various others.

In Berkeley, yesterday I attended and spoke at the "Robotics: Science and Systems" conference which had a workshop on autonomous vehicles. That runs to Wednesday, but overlapping and near SF Airport is the Automated Vehicles Symposium -- a merger of the TRB (Transportation Research Board) and AUVSI conferences on the same topic. 500 are expected to attend.

So far it's been big players like Google and car companies with plans in the self-driving space. Today, a small San Francisco start-up named Cruise, founded by Kyle Vogt (a founder of the web video site Justin.tv) announces their plans to make a retrofit kit that will adapt existing cars to do basic highway cruise, which is to say, staying in a lane and keeping pace behind other cars while under a driver's supervision.

On my recent wanderings in Europe, I became quite enamoured by Google's
latest revision of transit directions. Google has had transit directions for
some time, but they have recently improved them, and linked them in more cities
to live data about where transit vehicles actually are.

I'm in the home stretch of a long international trip -- photos to follow -- but I speak tomorrow at Lincoln Center on how computers (and robocars) will change the worlds of finance. In the meantime, Google's announcement last month has driven a lot of news in the Robocar space worthy of reporting.

In what is the biggest announcement since Google first revealed their car project, it has announced that they are building their own car, a small low-speed urban vehicle for two with no steering wheel, throttle or brakes. It will act as a true robocar, delivering itself and taking people where they want to go with a simple interface. The car is currently limited to 25mph, and has special pedestrian protection features to make it even safer. (I should note that as a consultant to that team, I helped push the project in this direction.)

Many states and jurisdictions are rushing to write laws and regulations governing the testing and deployment of robocars. California is working on its new regulations right now. The first focus is on testing, which makes sense.

I read a lot of feeds, and there are now scores of stories about robocars every week. Almost every day a new publication gives a summary of things. Here, I want to focus on things that are truly new, rather than being comprehensive.